No. Nuh-uh. No no no no no. Frank Zappa put out plenty of sub-par records in his day, and many devotees will forgive and forget most of it (myself included). They’ll even go as far as enjoying the shitty records on principle or something, at least portions of the records. They’ll even defend the shitty records, including this one. I will never EVER give Fillmore East – June 1971 a pass as long as I’m alive on this rotting corpse we call Mother Earth. This is not a good album, I’m sorry. There are good parts, assuredly, but I refuse to defend any and all “good parts” that take dedication to unveil from this swirling miasma of fetid elephant shit. Not worth defending the good stuff to paint an apologetic picture of the bad stuff. In short, don’t waste your time with this album. I mean, take a look: the deliberately uninspired album title and the pencil handwriting on the plain white cover suggest to me that Zappa either attempted to pass this off as a bootleg or was directly mocking bootlegs in general. Either way, subconsciously, I don’t think he had too high of an opinion of this final product anyway.

Look back to my Chunga’s Revenge review to read my rambling, ranty opinions about Flo and Eddie, because I won’t bother rehashing all that in full again here. Chunga’s Revenge showed restraint with respect to the Flo and Eddie shenanigans, but on Fillmore East – June 1971 those two turds are front and center the entire time. This is a live album, documenting two concerts over the course of two consecutive days with bits spliced together as a connected, thematic package. The theme, of course, is…I don’t know, immaturity? Sexism? Pig-headedness? During the Flo & Eddie years there was a stronger emphasis on stage antics at the expense of the music, especially during live performances. This album feels like a show recording of a struggling comedy troupe. “The Mud Shark”, “What Kind of Girl Do You Think We Are?”, “Bwana Dik”, “Do You Like My New Car?”, these are all essentially glorified stand-up comedy routines taking up nearly half of the record. And guess what, brother? It’s all really FUCKING unfunny. Just abysmal, unintelligent preoccupations about hookups with groupies replete with awful sex puns. Don’t forget that Frank had full creative control on all of his output by this point, so it’s not like Beavis and Butthead over here were helping Frank write any of these bits. In fact, the archival release Playground Psychotics will make this even more obvious 20 years later (but it doesn’t paint Flo and Eddie in a less annoying light, unfortunately). It pains me to say this, but I can’t fault Flo and Eddie for a lot of what’s happening on Fillmore East – June 1971 and subsequent Flo and Eddie records, as easy as it is for them to retain scapegoat status for most fans on the shortcomings of this era of Zappa’s career. I, however, can and will certainly still hate the timbre of their shitty voices.

ALLOW ME TO GET MORE SPECIFIC, THOUGH, ON THE BULLSHIT PERVADING THIS RECORD: On “The Mud Shark”, Zappa himself regales everyone with a semi-famous tale that FASCINATED him involving a lewd happenstance among members of Vanilla Fudge, members of Led Zeppelin, and a promiscuous young groupie (the event even has its own Wikipedia page, look it up!). There’s a hotel in Seattle that allows you do go fishing right out your room’s window into the bay below and, allegedly, these guys caught a fish, tied the groupie to the hotel bed naked, and stuck pieces of the fish into her body. Different recounts offer different levels of the woman’s consent, ranging from “really into it” to “rapey as fuck”. To this day it’s all hearsay, and since John Bonham choked on his own puke in the early ’80s I’m surprised they didn’t just pin it all on him in the end. Zappa loves these kinds of stories because it validates his ever-present negative and cynical feelings about rock culture while simultaneously reveling in the shock value such stories provide for his live performances. The song ends with Flo & Eddie repeating the words of the “Mud Shark Dance” (“Out…/You go out…/So far out…You do the Mud Shark, baby“).

Frank removes himself from the spotlight at this point and allows Flo and Eddie to do their thing for most of the rest of the record. “What Kind of Girl Do You Think We Are?” is a sleazy, lounge blues number featuring some back and forth dialogue more on the subject of good old-fashioned groupie-fuckin’. There’s even some continuity peppered throughout about sex with sea creatures, thank god for that! Once it’s established that these subject women are only interested in fuckin’ members of a band with commercial success and charting hit singles (oh, ok, so there’s jealousy behind it after all huh?), it segues into “Bwana Dik” which is a dumb two minutes of dick-size boasting. “Latex Solar Beef” is presumably a song about dicks too, but its lyrics are cryptic and hemorrhoids are referenced for no obvious reasons. “Do You Like My New Car?” is a conversation piece about groupie-fuckin’, you know, for a change of pace. This one involves Flo and/or Eddie and/or whoever the fuck acting the role of enthusiastic groupies speaking to the rest of the uninterested band. This one will give you fun, cerebral gems such as “I’d like to come in your bus” and “Oh, you voluptuous Manhattan Island clit” that you can LAUGH and LAUGH about into the wee hours of the placid, sunrise-lit morning. All this funny-boy shit makes up 20 minutes of a 40-minute record. Awful.

I will still talk about the “good parts”, because even the worst suckfest albums accidentally contain good parts, but what really clinches the nonredeemable disappointment of Fillmore East – June 1971 is the exclusion of “Willie the Pimp, Part Two” from my Rykodisc CD version. It’s the AIDS icing on the HIV cake! OK, fuck me for such a bad joke, but I’m getting into the childish spirit of the album and I’m willfully channeling my inner 14-year-old. Apparently, both parts of “Willie the Pimp” were from two different shows and served as the closer and opener to sides one and two, respectively, of the original LP. Zappa opted to cut “Part Two” out of the CD version because, due to differing tempos, mixing, that kind of thing, combining the two parts wasn’t logistically optimal. Anyway, not the point, the point is that even sometimes the “good parts” can get sullied by the bad juju that comes with the territory of bad record, as if it were doomed from the start. But, if you’re the annoying hopeless optimist-type, you’ll find something to like about the “Little House I Used To Live In” intro, even if it pales in comparison to the full-blown Burnt Weeny Sandwich version for reasons of instrumental diversity and Flo/Eddie falsetto buffoonery, and it will deceitfully color your perception of what to expect next. And then there are the last four tracks, consisting of real goddamned music finally, that seems like such a departure from what has been heard so far that it’s like a completely tacked-on encore section. “Happy Together” is a faithful enough tribute to Flo and Eddie’s old band, the Turtles, that I’m surprised Frank was willing to include in his own canon. For me this is the highlight of record not because I’m a fan of the Turtles (I’m not), but it’s a tight pop tune that Frank could never write himself in a million years. It sticks out like a sore dick! “Lonesome Electric Turkey” is a forgettable and ultimately useless instrumental piece featuring some minimoog noodlings from guest former-Mother Don Preston that may have fit better on the previous album Chunga’s Revenge. This version of “Peaches En Regalia” is by-the-book and underwhelming (all live versions of the song are), and if you’ve read my Hot Rats review then you already know my unpopular opinion of this tune and I don’t need to elaborate. That leaves “Tears Begin To Fall” as the closer, which is features Zappa reverting back to his doo-wop proclivities, and since it was issued as a single it undermines all the previous satire regarding bands putting out hit singles. Blah.

Since I’m no longer a teenager I do try to suppress the snarky, ignorant thoughts of my inner 14-year-old in order to better myself as an open-minded person, you see, and since I’m also big ol’ liberal piece of shit on top of THAT I’m already predicting all the TIRESOME and repetitious Zappa gripes that I’m going to have as I move through his career. Here it goes: as a level-headed adult here in the 21st century, I’m finding that the kind of sexism saturated all over this record ages very poorly. I know enough about Frank Zappa to know that he was often overtly sexist to be callously thought-provoking at best and deliberately shocking at worst, but I don’t know enough to know if he carried deep-seated sincere sexist feelings. I think every white guy did in the ’60s and ’70s to some extent. I suppose utilizing it for philosophical or satirical reasons can be excusable when artfully executed, or at the very fucking least when it’s overshadowed by good music, but it’s not happening on Fillmore East – June 1971 in either case. I really don’t find the Mud Shark legend fascinating, I find it gross and ugly. But that’s just me.

Congratulations to Frank Zappa, my favorite musical artist of all time, on receiving the very first “Sucks” rating that I’ve given out so far on my blog. It would be irresponsible of me to give this any other rating. Fuck this shit and the shitty shit horse it rode in on.

SUCKS